Photoblog of Joshua Christian Drewlow

Monthly Archives: November 2013

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I feel so happy to write you another post from Odessa, Ukraine! I hope you are all doing well in where ever you are over the world 🙂
Me and my companion we love cooking the good food we found here in Odessa!

Much stuff we buy on the рынок (market), which is right behind the church building.

Well, as we came back for lunch, there was no electricity in the whole building, so we put the food from the fridge on the outside of the window.

When we came back in the evening the power was still off and we also saw, that two other huge blocks were out off power the same time. We had bought some candles and then had our 3 hour planning session in romantic candle light 😛

Our church building in Tairovsky, there are 4 in Odessa:

A small kid from the church whose name is Никита had so much fun with my camera and took a picture of me 😀

A picture from inside a Маршутка, the buses here in Ukraine/Russia, sometimes full packed! Every ride costes 2.5 Гриевен – 0.31 dollar.

My companion is doing language study with me. He is almost 1.5 years on mission and his russian is amazing!

A picture from yesterday evening, an easy swiss/ukrainian dinner 🙂

Wow it is just crazy to be on a mission! It is hard everyday, but we learn so much! In ceveral moments I realize, how God guides us and leads us to the persons that are interested in the Gospel. More than ever before in my life I feel, that there is a God that reall cares for every child on earth, even when it feels hard sometimes. If something wouldn’t be hard, our muscles wouldn’t be strengthened and we wouldn’t try as hard as we can to beat all challenges that we have in life.

I’m so happy, that I already realized before my mission, how much we are blessed, when we live what the principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ teach us. Now on the mission it became much more important for me. It gives me all the power, all that love to help the people here, find their way back to God. When we live the commandments of God, we receive his blessings and feel his love. And I can tell you, to feel that is amazing!

Have a nice week! May God bless you in all your righteouss thoughts and doings 🙂
With love,
Elder Drewlow

We safetly arrived here in Ukraine and working hard here!
The first two days we have been in Kiev for Missionary Training and we met our new Companions 🙂
Elder Hinkson and me in front of the Kiev Temple.

On the transfer from all new missionaries (18) my backpack with all my important stuff (including camera) got lost, btw. the Taxi driver who drove the Sister Missionaries to another part of Kiev took the backpack accidently. On Thursday we have again Missionary Training in Kiev an I will get my stuff back wuhuu! So this pictures in this post here were taken with the camera from my companion. Thank you Elder Hinkson! 😀
On Sunday we had a baptism from a young man called Игорь 🙂 He is 24 and a really cool guy! Today in the morning we went jogging with him.

On Sunday night we were invited to a members house by an older lady. She is so nice! She is poor, but served us delicious homemade tea and omelette 🙂

Today we have been to the famous market in Odessa called южный рынок! It was amazing and it’s huge! We bought a lot of fruits, vegetables, cheese and meat. The best thing: you can try everything! The people are so nice to talk with and were very happy to see us 😀
At home I made a delicous lunch out of the stuff I bought:

Elder Hinkson showed me a fine ukrainian omelette mit cheese 🙂

With that good food I’ll probably survive here 😉 The time here is so great! Missiony work is very hard and every night we are so tired, but what I feel when talking to the people is amazing! Every day I feel, that God loves all his children, even they don’t believe him or reject us. The people here are very open and like to talk about God and life. Compared to my companion my russian is terrible, but I progress very fast.
Here is something I taped for you today afternoon:

[audio:http://blog.drewjosh.ch/wp-content/uploads/812_0046.mp3]

And yeah, right now I’m serving in Odessa, the most awesome city here in the Ukraine!
This is the train station right next to our house. I’m looking forward to take more pictures for next monday! 😉

The two years before me just began and every day is getting more intense!
See you!

With love,
Elder Drewlow

PS: if you have any questions or thoughts write me a mail or comment! I would love to answer them!

Hallihallo! The time here is passing so fast! We are in our 8th week now and we are leaving next week! We got our flight plans, we got our Russian name tags and we are studying as hard as we can!

In the MTC I found a picture from Switzerland 😀

Our classroom from the hall

Yesterday we received our Russian name tags!

My companion and me 🙂

Well, dear friends, this is the last post from here in the MTC. Next greetings will come from Kiev Ukraine. On the November 12th we will depart from Amsterdam Airport to Kiev 🙂 You can wave me if you want, it’s that blue Airplane 😀

I hope you all do very well! 1000 Thanks for all the pictures and letters you send me 🙂

Hi friends! Because of international readers, this blog will be continued in English. Hurray! And probably in Russian also (we heard in Russian the people love blogging!).
Last Friday all the international were able to go on a one day trip to the Salt Lake City Temple! I was very excited, because the most important events in Church History happened on that place. First we did an Endowment Session and after this we had a tour on the Temple Square and then we visited the Humanitarian Center (more in an other blogpost).

The one hour drive from the MTC to the Temple was very interesting. A “tour guide” talked about the most important/interesting events and shared some stories. For me the time was very spiritual, to be exactly at that place, where all that things happened which I learned before. I felt the Holy Ghost very strong and he testified me, that all this things really happened 🙂
If you want to find more about the Church History read here. A lot of information you can find on lds.org. Just search right in the top for ‘church history’.

Ok here, the pictures from the tour:

Salt Lake City Temple

A model from the inside of the temple (the temple inside is very beautiful!).

In the museum beside the temple you can read a lot about the history, the construction, etc. The early church members needed 40 years to build the temple, which is very impressing!

Beside the temple their is a small chapel, where some of the first Sunday Sacrament Meetings were held.

Beside the Chapel is the Tabernacle Choir with the impressive pipe organ, which has 11’623 pipes.

And beside the Tabernacle Choir their is the Church Visitor Center, where you can read much about the Life of Jesus Christ and the model of Jerusalem.

The Jesus statue

On the other side of the street is the big Conference Center from the Church. Sadly we couldn’t go inside, because it was closed that day 🙁

After the Temple visit we drove to the Humanitarian Center. More in text post 😉